In her second consecutive term as chief minister of West Bengal (pop.91 million) after the Trinamool Congress (TMC) party routed the CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist)-led Left Front government which ruled the state for 34 years (1977-2011) uninterruptedly, chief minister Mamata Banerjee has belatedly focused her attention on public health and education, the two most neglected sectors of West Bengal’s economy. Following a stream of reports of children dying of infectious diseases in government hospitals, on February 22 she announced the establishment of a State Health Regulatory Commission to be headed by a retired high court judge, as a watchdog of the state’s languishing healthcare system. 

Meanwhile, on February 13 education minister Partha Chatterjee announced that the recruitment of 72,000 teachers for the state’s 92,000 government schools will be completed by March 15. However, this announcement has been greeted — as last year, when it was first made — with a storm of protests. Trained teachers with B.Ed degrees who failed the state’s TET (Teacher Eligibility Test) have challenged the selection of new primary teachers. They contend that some of the newly recruited teachers who have cleared the state government TET are ineligible for appointment under NCTE (National Council for Teacher Education) rules, as they haven’t passed the B.Ed exam. Moreover, they allege that TET papers were selectively leaked to TMC-favoured candidates.

Teacher recruitment and deployment in government schools is increasingly becoming a big issue in West Bengal which suffered heavy de-industrialisation during 34 years of Left Front rule, when CPM-affiliated trade unions and extortionist party cadres triggered a flight of capital out of the state. Although by all accounts the Left Front government was able to benefit the state’s agriculture sector, youth unemployment is rampant in urban West Bengal. Therefore, government teachers’ jobs are highly prized by the lower middle and middle middle class, while upper middle class educated youth are fleeing West Bengal in droves, a phenomenon the TMC government, which also scared India Inc with the closure of a Tata Motors factory in Singur in 2008 (it has since moved to Gujarat), hasn’t been able to reverse. Moreover, in 2011, the TMC government denied an application made by the Bangalore-based IT major Infosys Technologies Ltd to establish an SEZ (Special Export Zone) in West Bengal.

Nevertheless, the process of recruiting teachers for government primaries has been completed. But the prospect of recruiting 32,000 teachers for the government’s upper primary, secondary and higher secondary schools in the near future is bleak because more than 15 writ petitions alleging examination and testing irregularities including leakage of TET test papers, are pending in the Calcutta high court. According to the state’s School Services Commission, which conducts TET and appoints government teachers, 121,000 candidates were interviewed for 15,000 upper primary vacancies, 143,000 wrote TET for the 10,500 secondary school vacancies and 153,000 wrote the higher secondary TET for 7,000 positions. Results of the secondary and higher secondary TETs are stayed by the courts for alleged testing irregularities, whereas the interview process for recruitment of upper primary teachers is yet to begin.

With the recruitment of candidates who passed TET in 2015 remaining uncertain even in 2017, teacher recruitment for government schools has been frozen since 2012 dashing the hopes of thousands of youth who aspire to become government school teachers. And with teacher recruitment at a standstill, the average teacher-pupil ratio in government schools has risen to 1:59 against the 1:35 prescribed by the Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009.

Unsurprisingly, West Bengal is ranked #31 in the Educational Development Index of the Delhi-based National University for Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA). Moreover, according to the recently (January 18, 2017) released Annual Status of Education Report 2016 of the reputed Mumbai-based NGO Pratham, 49.8 percent of class V children in West Bengal’s government rural primaries cannot read class II textbooks (cf. 46.8 percent in 2010). 

Comments Rita Haldar, mother of a government primary school student who filed a writ petition last October challenging the recruitment of untrained primary teachers: “According to NCTE regulations only B.Ed graduates are eligible to be appointed as teachers in government schools, whereas the TMC government is appointing non-B.Eds who clear TET. Our agitation against this malpractice by the state government will continue till the trained teachers are given a fair chance.” 

The more things change, the more they remain the same in West Bengal’s strife-torn education system.

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)